Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

My heart leaps when I behold the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) rising in her place, as of course it does when I behold my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack). This debate is essentially about our constitution, our freedoms and liberties and our procedures. The former Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), had, in the fat years of new Labour, grown used to seeing this place merely as a Chamber for public announcements. That is what we have become and that is what we reduce ourselves to. How can the Government conceive of such a new procedure to address fundamental propositions that are to become the law of this land in a process that seeks to bind us and to override, in a sense, parliamentary sovereignty, or the sovereignty of the people? They do not trouble themselves to stop and ask, ““But who do we represent?”” If I tell people something, how do they protest against it? I will have to turn round and say that it is put in a tablet that rises far beyond this Chamber and is more important than us here. To construct something such as this motion is shaming for a Government. They have lost their rationale and sense of purpose, and in doing so they make us open to being an object of contempt. God save the health service after the speech by the right hon. Lady, the former Health Secretary. What was she saying? She has had many chats with her constituents who apparently say that they want to hear Parliament discuss thematic schemes. Perhaps they do, but I have constituents who also want the death penalty back and who want all manner of things discussed. Such things are reflected in the motion before us, because it refers to a charter of rights. Among those things is the supremacy or otherwise—I do not know where it stands in this—of the European convention on human rights. We are charged, as was rightly said by my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire and the noble lady, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich—[Interruption.] It is true, she is noble. She reminds us of why we are here. We noted and then, I am sorry to say, largely ignored the exposition by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris). It is so creeping to support the position of one’s Government on something that he, as a solicitor representing a client, would not accept as the basis for a deal. I remind the House that the most intelligent breakdown of the issues at stake, to take just home affairs and justice—which we are supposed to consider tomorrow—was made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). His exposition should be sent to every Member of Parliament. Someone also made the observation that many of these contentions would, under our normal processes, have to be introduced as individual measures in the form of a Bill, but they are now all rolled up into one. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, when he was briefly the Chief Secretary, seemed to toy with the idea that we could not even reject taxation—the very cause that fired the 17th century. In the 18th century, the slogan ““no taxation without representation”” held a strong power. He did not even understand the constitutional basis, but he tried to tell us about the management of the Maastricht Bill. He also told us—we heard it time and again from those on the Front Bench—about Mrs. Thatcher’s rebate. He was 14 at the time. Do he and the others behind this motion really know the history of their country? Do they understand the vitality and vigour with which the Crown had to be captured? Now the Government flaunt themselves before us, demanding that we cut down consideration to that which they alone have judged to be correct. There are no wise heads now in great Departments of state. I do not know what clever young man or woman came up with this shaming construct, but where was the reasonableness of the sane, experienced politician, someone who had enjoyed the honour of the great offices of state, to say, ““This will not do””? We did not even see this motion—this profound change in the manner in which we address a great constitutional issue—until last Wednesday. Do we honestly think that that is appropriate? I sincerely hope that the motion is defeated, but if it is not, tomorrow we are expected to conform with it and to debate and dispense with the most profoundly important issues—criminal law and justice, the central responsibilities with which we are charged. There is no way that this House, in a rational mood, should accept that, but we have become so partisan. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire said, the Government now even try to equate their systematic guillotining of every Bill with the years of Mrs. Thatcher. I used to follow the issue closely, but it does not need to be followed closely any more because there is now a sledgehammer beating away at our traditional liberties. If we are personalising the debate to one Prime Minister, we could say that Mrs. Thatcher guillotined about 42 Bills. That required some 63 guillotine motions, because in those days it was necessary to show respect to the other place. When it accepted an amendment, we had to consider it. This impatient Government will have none of that. After an hour or an hour and a half of debate, they bat Lords amendments straight back. The Executive want to ensure that they get their business. The first decision was on the hours of the House and how long we should sit, but it should have been the other way round. The question should be what business do we have to do, and then we can ask how many hours are necessary to consider it. Ministers seem to think that 36, or even 50, hours of discussion of a Bill, even one that covers such a range of issues, is wholly adequate. Almost every free contributor to this debate—by which I mean even the good fellows who try to support their Front-Bench colleagues through thick and thin—must know that this has gone too far. All three parties, and now the Scottish Nationalists, the Scottish Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly and now even the Welsh Assembly, want a referendum on this issue, but the one thing that the Government promised is not in the motion. We do not know whether a referendum amendment will be selected. It should have been a Government amendment to honour their promise, but everyone knows that they are hoping it will not appear on the Order Paper. Every hon. Member knows that millions of men and women will think, in the back of their minds, that their representative asked for their vote predicated on the undertaking that if this treaty were approved, the people would be the ultimate determinants of its fate. The failure to respect that undertaking is a big breach of a solemn understanding. It troubles the Liberal Democrats, as we have heard. They have constructed a new theology on the point, and we all heard the remarkable contribution by their leader. He said that he would vote against the Government on a referendum clause, except if they were going to lose, in which case he would vote with the Government. These are matters of high principle, and the knockabout sounds childish and trivial, but that is why this House is marginalised too often—it is not even held in contempt, but marginalised. We have become the backcloth for the Executive to parade around our Parliament, the country and the world. The House no longer engages in debates of substance, such as whether these general thematic debates should take precedence over the very substance of the Bill—the clause stand part debates and so on that should inform the general debate. We should hear the arguments and then have the general debate. That was a point well made by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson. We have things the wrong way round. As for the marginal point—it is not a marginal point, but it is treated as one—that Mr. Speaker could, in case of a national emergency, elect to address in precedence to the business of the day, the Minister failed to understand that if the Government protected the business, it would not matter if three hours were taken out at the beginning of the day because it could be added on at the end. We struggled to get that simple point through to the Minister for Europe. I am not surprised that the Foreign Secretary is elsewhere engaged. He has had a rough time in the exchanges on the Floor of the House. His enthusiasm for the causes that he knows are so right and just disables him from understanding that these are matters of passion, of justice and of the credibility of this House. We should, as Members of Parliament, get the Government to revert to the old process, by which such matters are properly and effectively discussed.